A Peek Behind the Scenes? How About a Good Long Look

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You may or may not have noticed a quiet transformation in American Theatre since late last year. For many years the feature Production Notebook graced our magazine with a two-page spread of striking photos, showcasing the design aspects of a recent-ish production, with a few quotes from the design team and typically the show’s director.

This beloved fixture had a few shortcomings, in my view. First, it privileged the work of visual designers (set, costume, and, less frequently, lighting), not to mention productions that had the good sense (or the budget) to take and provide us with beautiful photos—a show without them wouldn’t make the cut. But, of course, design is an integral and many-shaded thing; eye-­catching is not its end-all, be-all. I worried that in throwing designers this monthly bone—admittedly, a gorgeous-looking bone—amid more wide-ranging ­stories about playwrights, directors, and actors, we were missing too much of the real story of how theatre is made in the U.S., plank by plank and cue by cue.

Production Notebook, December 2010.

Our approach toward this deficit may sound counterintuitive, but hear me out. Production Notebook, as its name always promised, is now a long-form reported piece about the entire process behind a given show at a ­different resident theatre each month. While the focus is no longer narrowly trained on a show’s design, let alone just one aspect of its design, the length and depth of these new-style Production Notebooks allow reporters to follow a show through all its decisions, from dramaturgy to design, casting to set construction, tech week to ticketing. This “rehearsal to reviews” coverage can highlight different challenges and practices for all different kinds of shows at all different sorts of theatres, and I’d argue allows us to cover design, when it’s a central part of a production’s process, in more granular specificity than ever before.

We’ve also got a new feature in the front of the magazine called Design Corner (it typically appears online here), in which we focus on one aspect of a show’s design, à la the old Production Notebook. And our next issue will contain what we hope to be the first of an annual spotlight on design and tech, with a Production Notebook that promises to be a design-heavy exploration of a form-breaking new Ameri­can play. That’s all I can say for now, but trust, if you will, that we at American Theatre have our eyes and ears—all our senses, let’s say—attuned with renewed attention to the struggles and successes, big and small, of American stagecraft as it’s practiced today. And we’re taking notes.